OED and EDD: comparison of the printed and online versions
-
Manfred Markus
Abstract
This paper revisits the issue of the opaque interrelationship between the English Dialect Dictionary (EDD) and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). While work on OED3, the online version, has been in progress since 2000, the EDD was digitised in three phases between 2006 and 2019. EDD 3.0, with its sophisticated interface, was launched in April 2019. This paper ventures to question the OED’s policy of providing or omitting source evidence for some of its data. After a survey of the unequal aims and structures of the two dictionaries from their beginnings down to the end of OED2 (1989), the focus of the paper is on their relationship with regard to the two online versions, first as described by recent OED editors, and then by examining the interfaces. A quantitative analysis of the lexical variants attributed to Worcestershire in the two dictionaries is used as a test case to show that OED3 has borrowed more data from EDD (Online) than the OED entries attest and the ranking-list of sources misleadingly suggests. The paper critically analyses the OED’s practice of providing source evidence only for quotations, but generally not for (dialectal) variants.
© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Thematic Part : Historical lexicography of the landscape and the digital age [Historische Lexikographie der Landschaft und des digitalen Zeitalters / Lexicographie historique du paysage et de l’ère numérique]
- LandLex: Historical landscape and the digital age
- LandLex: Historische Lexikographie der Landschaft und des digitalen Zeitalters
- Visions of lexicography of a semantic European
- Interlinguality in historical conceptography
- Spatial cognition in landscape designations in the area of the Old European Hydronymy
- A Portuguese 18th-century dictionary rescued from oblivion
- Squeezing Italian dictionaries in search of citrus juice and fruit
- Estonian words for ‘field’ in historical dictionaries
- Words crossing borders
- Hills and mountains in the lexicography of (Modern) Greek
- Trees in the landscape: orchard trees in a 17th-century French dictionary
- FWB-online – a brief insight into an online dictionary revealing information on historical linguistics, cultural history and the impact of time and geography on the German language in the early modern era
- Non-thematic Part
- Pickering’s influence on Craigie and Hulbert’s Dictionary of American English (1936–1944)
- OED and EDD: comparison of the printed and online versions
- South and Southeast Asian languages and Renaissance Italy
- Reviews
- Considine, John (ed.), The Cambridge World History of Lexicography, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019, 961 S.
- Reports
- Die Villa Vigoni Thesen zur Lexikographie
- Lexicography in Higher Education
- Der Europäische Master für Lexikographie 2021 an der Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Thematic Part : Historical lexicography of the landscape and the digital age [Historische Lexikographie der Landschaft und des digitalen Zeitalters / Lexicographie historique du paysage et de l’ère numérique]
- LandLex: Historical landscape and the digital age
- LandLex: Historische Lexikographie der Landschaft und des digitalen Zeitalters
- Visions of lexicography of a semantic European
- Interlinguality in historical conceptography
- Spatial cognition in landscape designations in the area of the Old European Hydronymy
- A Portuguese 18th-century dictionary rescued from oblivion
- Squeezing Italian dictionaries in search of citrus juice and fruit
- Estonian words for ‘field’ in historical dictionaries
- Words crossing borders
- Hills and mountains in the lexicography of (Modern) Greek
- Trees in the landscape: orchard trees in a 17th-century French dictionary
- FWB-online – a brief insight into an online dictionary revealing information on historical linguistics, cultural history and the impact of time and geography on the German language in the early modern era
- Non-thematic Part
- Pickering’s influence on Craigie and Hulbert’s Dictionary of American English (1936–1944)
- OED and EDD: comparison of the printed and online versions
- South and Southeast Asian languages and Renaissance Italy
- Reviews
- Considine, John (ed.), The Cambridge World History of Lexicography, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019, 961 S.
- Reports
- Die Villa Vigoni Thesen zur Lexikographie
- Lexicography in Higher Education
- Der Europäische Master für Lexikographie 2021 an der Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg